Recently Facebook introduced their new timeline feature. This shows items in date order, against a central ‘time’ line running down the middle of the web page. You can now add milestones into the timeline which can be useful to populate a bit of historical info…

The layout has also changed requiring a cover image that goes at the top of the page along with a larger profile image, which is used as the thumbnail against any comments you make, and lastly the apps you make available are also shown just under the cover image, using new sized images.

As the timeline feature is optional some of my Facebook friends have already started using it, but some haven’t. I resisted the urge to change as I didn’t see anything wrong with the current system…

Then Facebook decided to force all Pages—like my peteoshea page, not your personal profile—to use timeline. I thought it might be useful to record some of the important sizes for anyone else about to move to timeline.

Having been working for myself for 18 months I still haven’t achieved anywhere near as much as I had hoped. Now don’t get me wrong I have done a few things in that time that I am very pleased with. The problem is that I just haven’t found nearly as much time as I had wanted to, to spend on the personal projects I had envisaged.

Over that time I have had some good months and some not so good months…

Then I was offered some extra work for my old company but this came with some extra restrictions. This got me thinking as to whether I would just be better off returning to full time employment. Am I really cut out to be my own boss?

Time to reflect on my original decision and see if my feelings have changed in any way…

I am a very methodical person, some might say borderline OCD. I like to follow a fixed set of rules in a simple, logical manner. Whether this is due to my choice of career or simply a reason why programming is my career, I’ll never know.

If the rules are well defined then I can crank out work at a pretty good rate. The fuzzier the logic then the slower I can become. If the rules are unknown or very unrestrictive then I can flounder over the simplest of tasks. A simple thing like picking a name for a variable can sometimes waste 5 minutes or so if there are no pre-defined coding rules…

If you find yourself resisting something then it is likely that you have some piece of information missing. Without that missing piece the job seems too hard to tackle and so your subconscious tries to find ways to avoid it.

Noticing these points of resistance early on can be a great boon for productivity!

Now that I have an iMac I deal with my photos pretty much exclusively on that. There is still always the occasional need to view images in Windows and the built in Photo Viewer program is pretty good.

One thing that does annoy me though is that, by default, there is usually a yellow cast over the whole image. This happened to me with Windows Vista and now I am getting the same thing on Windows 7.

It’s not hard to fix but it’s one of those things that I had to look up on the internet so I thought I would write a quick post for anyone else getting the problem. Maybe you have seen it and not realised there is even a problem…

I was recently asked what I thought about bridge cameras. To be honest I hadn’t really heard much about them before but when shown what they could do I was amazed.

A few days later I was packing my camera backpack for a day out down to Snowdrop Valley. Having not been there before I wasn’t sure about which lenses I might need so I took all three of the lenses I currently own, a wide-angle zoom, a prime lens and a telephoto zoom. (You can see more details of the lenses I use on the new Gadgets page I have set up listing all my gear)

I did in fact use all three lenses but they make the bag quite heavy and the constant switching of lenses is really starting to bug me. Sometimes I end up taking all three lenses and only using one of them…

As they were fresh in my mind this got me thinking about bridge cameras. Should I replace my dated DSLR with a bridge camera?

We have had some minor successes at growing our own vegetables in our rather small back garden. Last year we tried growing courgettes, spring onions, lettuces, sweetcorn, parsnips, carrots, broccoli and potatoes along with some herbs, amongst other things.

Most worked out quite well, except for the broccoli for some reason. There were some restrictions in our small garden though as the whole area was paved over a few years ago. This meant that everything has to be grown in pots and a single raised bed. The carrots and parsnips didn’t really have the depth they required and so turned out a bit small but they were still nice.

There’s something really rewarding about picking, cooking and eating something that you have grown yourself.

So in about August last year Shirley put our names down for an allotment. There was a waiting list so we weren’t expecting to hear back for some time…

Then in January we got a phone call offering us a plot at Turners Allotments, which is within easy walking distance for us. We jumped at the chance and are now the proud holders of our own allotment.

As I have mentioned before I am on a mission to purge a lot of stuff from my life. Especially items that I no longer have use for.

Over the years I had accumulated a fairly large collection of books. I only ever read them once but I just liked to have a copy of each book I read. This even went to the level of me picking up a couple of books from a second hand shop with no intention of ever reading them…

I had read a lot of books while travelling. Some I boxed up and sent home—another wasted cost looking back—but others I either borrowed or left behind when moving on. One such book was The Beach by Alex Garland—the subsequent film was OK but the book was much better. Everyone seemed to be reading that book so I borrowed it off a friend and really enjoyed it. So much so I decided to pick up a copy when I got home just to sit on my shelf and gather dust…

Anyway you get the picture, I had a pretty large collection of books, some paperback and some hardback, that I wanted to get rid of so I thought I would simply sell them online.

At the end of each year I like to look back and review what I got up to and then look forward to the year ahead. Last Year I posted most of the details of this personal review here on this site. Now it’s time to look back and see how I got on.